SYMPTOMS

In Katana 3.0 upwards, lights from renderers other than 3Delight (for example RenderMan or Arnold) may not appear in the legacy Viewer tab, although they are displayed in the Viewer (Hydra) tab.

CAUSE

This behaviour is a known limitation of Viewer Modifier Plug-ins (VMPs), which are used in the Viewer tab to display specific scene graph location types such as lights. As only one VMP can be registered for any particular location type at a time, the plug-ins provided by any additional renderer plug-in loaded by Katana may now be overridden by the 3Delight VMPs if the software is initialised with 3Delight loaded.

The Viewer (Hydra) tab uses a different method to display lights and other locations (Viewer Delegate Components or VDCs) and has no such limitation.

RESOLUTION

Our advice for this case is to use the Viewer (Hydra) tab to work with lights, or to initialise the software with only one rendering plug-in loaded at a time if using the legacy Viewer tab.